Drupal

We recently released Drupal Commerce 2.8 and are excited to highlight some of the new features. We also published new releases of two key contributed modules that make lightning-fast, client-side Add to Cart forms possible, representing a significant improvement to the customer experience.

Drupal Commerce 2.8 adds BOGO support

The most significant new feature in the 2.8 release is the “Buy X, Get Y” offer type funded by Norwegian Drupal agency Ny Media. You can now configure promotions with just core functionality that grant free or reduced price products after a set number of other products have been added to the cart. This work required a re-architecture of parts of the promotions data model and a redesign of the user interface to make it easier for merchants to create promotions in general.

Read the release notes to get the full scope of additional updates and also to learn about some backward compatibility breaks that affect custom promotions, custom tax types, and order processors. We'll keep chipping away at the core roadmap and plan to add query-level entity access to the API for the next release.

Commerce Cart Flyout “Add to Cart” Update

The newest release of the Cart Flyout module includes notable updates to its JavaScript based “Add to Cart” feature. In addition to powering an editable shopping cart in a “flyout” sidebar, it now improves the Add to Cart experience with a very fast client-side solution using resources defined by the Commerce Cart API.

The standard Add to Cart form uses Drupal’s Forms API to update form elements based on attribute selection. It can submit three to four Ajax requests on average while customers select a product variation, but the new module can build, update, and submit the form purely in the client via JavaScript. Because the server sends the browser all the data it needs to build the interactive form in the initial request, we're able to avoid any additional requests to the server until the customer is actually ready to initiate the Add to Cart. Check it out:

Following up on our Commerce 2.8 release, we've released updates to our Cart Flyout and Cart API modules to build, update, and submit dynamic Add to Cart forms purely in the browser via JavaScript. More on this decoupling effort in the latest blog: https://t.co/yXcZOv1RQypic.twitter.com/bIikuiERaq

Even under high visitor load, users will have a faster experience overall. Server resources are only devoted to users who decide to convert. Casual visitors can browse and modify product variations as much as they like and not affect other users’ load times. This is yet another step on our path toward providing a progressively decoupled eCommerce solution for the community to build robust experiences for merchants and consumers.

BigPipe is a technique pioneered by Facebook that’s used to lazy-load content into a webpage. From the user’s perspective, the “frame” of a webpage will appear immediately, and then the content will pop in place when it’s ready. BigPipe has been included as a module in Drupal core since 8.1.x, and is very simple— just enable the module.

On my latest project, I'm using it to lazy-load content that’s generated from a very slow API call. The functionality works great out of the box, but we noticed a user-experience problem where the end-user would see a big blank area while the API call was waiting on a response. This behavior made the website seem broken. To fix this, we decided to implement a simple loading animation.

Finding the CSS selector to attach the animation to wasn’t as simple as I hoped it would be.

Spoiler: Let’s see the code

Looking for the code, and not the process? The CSS selector to target is below. Note that you’ll want to qualify this within a parent selector, so the loader doesn’t appear everywhere.

Finding this selector wasn’t as simple as I initially hoped. The first technique that I tried was setting a DOM breakpoint in Chrome Developer Tools. This functionality allows you to pause the execution of JavaScript when a DOM element’s attributes change, the element gets removed, or any descendant DOM elements are modified.

In our case, we want to set a breakpoint when any descendant element is modified and then reload the page. Hopefully, when BigPipe inserts the rendered HTML, the breakpoint will trigger, and we can then inspect the placeholder HTML to find the appropriate CSS selector.

Because I know I’m using the BigPipe module to stream the content in, the next step is setting a PHP breakpoint within the BigPipe module within PHPStorm. I ended up setting a breakpoint within the sendContent() function within BigPipeResponse.php. This had the expected result of pausing the lazy-loading of the content, which enabled me to easily inspect the HTML prior so I could find the placeholder’s selector.

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Conclusion

Sometimes a seemingly simple theming task ends up being tricky. It’s important to understand proper front-end and backend debugging techniques because you never know when you’re going to need them in a pinch. Hopefully, this article will save someone from having to go through this process.

The same vulnerability also exists in the Zend Feed and Diactoros libraries included in Drupal core; however, Drupal core does not use the vulnerable functionality. If your site or module uses Zend Feed or Diactoros directly, read the Zend Framework security advisory and update or patch as needed.

The Drupal Security Team would like to to thank the Symfony and Zend Security teams for their collaboration on this issue.

Versions affected

8.x versions before 8.5.6.

Solution

Upgrade to Drupal 8.5.6.

Versions of Drupal 8 prior to 8.5.x are end-of-life and do not receive security coverage.

Acquia recognized as a leader, next to Adobe and Sitecore, in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.

Analyst reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant are important because they introduce organizations to Acquia and Drupal. Last year, I explained it in the following way: "If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner.".

Our tenure as a top vendor is not only a strong endorsement of Acquia's strategy and vision, but also underscores our consistency. Drupal and Acquia are here to stay, which is a good thing.

What I found interesting about year's report is the increased emphasis on flexibility and ease of integration. I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's all about innovation through integration, rather than just innovation in the core platform itself.

Today, there is an incredible amount of value in community-driven innovation. Just look at the 2018 Martech 5000 — the supergraphic now includes 7,000 marketing technology solutions, which is a 27% increase from a year ago. This accelerated innovation isn't exclusive to marketing technology; its happening across every part of the enterprise technology stack. From headless commerce integrations to the growing adoption of JavaScript frameworks and emerging cross-channel experiences, organizations have the opportunity to re-imagine customer experiences like never before.

It's not surprising that customers are looking for an open platform that allows for open innovation and unlimited integrations. The best way to serve this need is through open APIs, decoupled architectures and an Open Source innovation model. This is why Drupal can offer its users thousands of integrations, more than all of the other Gartner leaders combined.

When you marry Drupal's community-driven innovation with Acquia's cloud platform and suite of marketing tools, you get an innovative solution across every layer of your technology stack. It allows our customers to bring powerful new experiences to market, across the web, mobile, native applications, chatbots and more. Most importantly, it gives customers the freedom to build on their own terms.

Acquia recognized as a leader, next to Adobe and Sitecore, in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.

Analyst reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant are important because they introduce organizations to Acquia and Drupal. Last year, I explained it in the following way: "If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner.".

Our tenure as a top vendor is not only a strong endorsement of Acquia's strategy and vision, but also underscores our consistency. Drupal and Acquia are here to stay, which is a good thing.

What I found interesting about year's report is the increased emphasis on flexibility and ease of integration. I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's all about innovation through integration, rather than just innovation in the core platform itself.

Today, there is an incredible amount of value in community-driven innovation. Just look at the 2018 Martech 5000 — the supergraphic now includes 7,000 marketing technology solutions, which is a 27% increase from a year ago. This accelerated innovation isn't exclusive to marketing technology; its happening across every part of the enterprise technology stack. From headless commerce integrations to the growing adoption of JavaScript frameworks and emerging cross-channel experiences, organizations have the opportunity to re-imagine customer experiences like never before.

It's not surprising that customers are looking for an open platform that allows for open innovation and unlimited integrations. The best way to serve this need is through open APIs, decoupled architectures and an Open Source innovation model. This is why Drupal can offer its users thousands of integrations, more than all of the other Gartner leaders combined.

When you marry Drupal's community-driven innovation with Acquia's cloud platform and suite of marketing tools, you get an innovative solution across every layer of your technology stack. It allows our customers to bring powerful new experiences to market, across the web, mobile, native applications, chatbots and more. Most importantly, it gives customers the freedom to build on their own terms.

This module implements the "Placeholder" add-on integration into CKEditor.
The optional Placeholder plugin allows you to create and modify read-only elements that are only editable through the Placeholder Properties dialog window. This feature is useful in all sorts of templates and texts that are repeated in numerous places whose format should not be modified.

Whenever you get into a situation where you are not sure which version of Drupal to use, or you expect to get challenged by a client, my recommendation is to use the approach of putting together the pros and cons, and see what insights emerge.

As developers, we sometimes forget that we live in a tech bubble. In our highly technical world we assume things that not everyone sees.

For example, there are still reasons that clients frequently cite to justify staying in an old version of Drupal, in this case Drupal 7, instead of starting a new project straight away in Drupal 8. This is true even when we are talking about starting a brand new project (as opposed to just migrating).

Over the course of the Syrian civil war, more than 12 million civilians have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands of these refugees are students, who now have to overcome the obstacle of re-entering the workforce or pursuing educational degrees away from home.

Article 26 Backpack addresses this challenge by offering refugees a secure way to share their educational credentials with admissions offices, scholarship agencies, and potentials employers. The program also includes face-to-face counseling to provide participants with academic advisory and career development.

This is a great example of how organizations are using Drupal to prioritize impact. It’s always inspiring to hear stories of how Drupal is changing lives for the better. Thank you to the UC Davis team for sharing their story, and continue the good work!

The Superfish module allows you to create multi-level dropdown menus in Drupal 8. The module uses the JavaScript Superfish library to create and display a Superfish menu block for each menu available on your site.

With a few configuration options, you can control how it’ll behavior on mobile, turn multi-column menus, change the styling and more.

The module does come with a few styling options but you’ll have to style it yourself to match your theme. When you configure Superfish the first time the dropdown functionality will, however, it may not look good.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install the module and how to configure it.

Provides a configuration filter to turn the configuration export into an overlay of the shipped configuration of all installed configuration. Installing this module and subsequently exporting configuration will leave only those configuration files in your export directory that have been added or modified relative to the shipped configuration of modules and installation profiles.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, invented in the 18th century by the French Orientalist Antoine Galland, portrays the literary history of the password. The invocation, “Open, Sesame!” which was used in this classic tale to open the magically sealed cave enjoys a broad currency as a catchphrase today.

With the rapidly evolving digital space, password security is even more crucial and needs the right kind of strategic perspective with strong policies. Drupal, being one of the most secure platforms among the leading content management systems, can help in enforcing password policies with its enormous security-oriented abilities.

Password Policy: A Close Look

Password security was brought into the computing world through the invention of the Compatible Time-Sharing System and Unics (Unix) system. This was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. The concept of the password was developed so that the users could only have the access to specific files in their allotted time of computer usage.

Source: Digital Guardian

A password policy is a particular collection of rules that enables proper storage and utilisation of passwords, helps in the creation of dependable and secure passwords and enhances computer security. Commonly, it is part of the official regulations of an organisation and might be employed as a component of security awareness training.

On what basis can you formulate password policy? One of the best collection of guidelines for password policy comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which is a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They have framed a set of Digital Identity Guidelines that provide a great basis on which password policy can be crafted.

The guidelines provided by NIST stresses on user-friendliness. It states that excessively onerous password policies often impacts negatively. For instance, if the users are forced to change their passwords every week, many of them would wind up choosing bad passwords.

Security has always been a compromise between allaying risk and convenience.

A research from Microsoft on password strategies suggests that simple passwords, which can be easily memorised, should be used for low-risk sites. Intricate passwords should be reserved for the sites where the security risks warrant huge repercussions. This suggestion is debatable but it illustrates the trade-off.

For instance, if your site involves users sharing fields of their pet dogs, you can have a lenient approach towards your password policy. Complex passwords may be used for sites where users access sensitive financial or healthcare-related data.

Can Drupal modules and configurations be used for implementing strong password policies?

By default, Drupal offers guidance on how to make your password stronger. But it does not enforce any password policy out-of-the-box. In order to do that, it comes with a huge library of modules that can help in the enforcement of firm password policies.

Setting restrictions on password

Password Policy, a Drupal module, allows you to lay a set of requirements on passwords that are created by the users. These requirements comprise of length, digits, case, punctuation etc. For instance, you can set what sort of characters and in what amount could be used in a password. It also comes with a password expiration feature.

Setting composition rules

The Password Policy lets you set up intricate composition rules for the passwords. But another Drupal module, Password Strength, offers a user-friendly alternative to prescriptive composition rules. It offers real-time password strength measurement and server-side enforcement.

NIST guidelines suggest that spaces are permitted in passwords which can contribute towards more user-friendly policies when it comes to passphrases. Drupal allows spaces in passwords out-of-the-box.

In case, you do not need any special locks, you can disable the password strength check using a Drupal module called Password Strength Disabler and allow users to feel at ease while creating passcodes.

Avoiding hints and reminders

In case, your website requires hints and reminders, you can add an additional lock to the doors by incorporating security questions while logging in and resetting passwords. Security Questions, a Drupal module, helps you in achieving this numerous configurable options.

However, NIST guidelines suggest that it is better to avoid hints and reminders. Security questions which are fairly easy to guess can be used to compromise user accounts.

But Drupal offers another very useful module called Username Enumeration Prevention which can make it difficult for website hackers to find the usernames and attempt any brute-force attacks.

Leveraging authentication procedure

In case, you need more than one lock, the Two-factor Authentication module can come in handy. It provides an extra layer of security to the authentication procedure. This can be one-time passwords (OTP), codes sent through SMS, or pre-generated codes. It also allows integration with third-party services like Authy, Duo etc.

An authentication and authorisation infrastructure system, Shibboleth is capable of granting individual users with safe, anywhere, anytime access to resources which are available online. Shibboleth authentication, Drupal module, offers user authentication with Shibboleth.

This confrontation in the so-called shibboleth incident in the 12th chapter of the biblical Book of Judges delineates the earlier forms of password security:

“ ‘Say now Shibboleth’; and he said ‘Sibboleth’; for he could not frame to pronounce it right; then they laid hold on him, and slew him at the fords of the Jordan.”
Implementing rate-limiting

Drupal does rate-limiting out-of-the-box. But there is no particular UI which exposes configuration that can be tweaked. Flood control, a Drupal module, allows you to limit the number of login attempts by using a convenient admin interface.

To take rate-limiting a step further, Login security module can be beneficial. It helps in limiting the number of invalid login attempts before blocking accounts or denying access by IP address temporarily or even permanently.

To facilitate the login attempts limitation by blocking out the sources of malicious requests, Fail2ban Firewall Integration module offers an automated firewall tool.

Enhancing login features

If your website is available via both HTTP and HTTPS, Secure Login module can ensure that your user login forms or other pages are transmitted via HTTPS. This keeps the passwords hidden from the prying eyes of hackers.

It is always appreciated when the user is given the convenience of using an all-in-one login. OneAll Social Login module allows users to sign in on your website using their social network accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Instagram etc.

In case, an user types an email address incorrectly in a sign-up form, he will not get any confirmation emails which can be troublesome. Email Verify module verifies whether the email address typed by the user exists or not.

Doing away with passwords altogether

What if you do not want to enter a password at all? The Passwordless module gives a possibility of logging in without using a password at all. So if a user has to log in, only the email address would be required. A login link will be sent to that email address which will be valid for 24 hours.

Outlining best practices of password policy

While Drupal is very efficacious in enforcing strong password policies, it is imperative to understand the best practices that can be adopted for incorporating intelligent password policy.

Source: Dashlane

Adopting the 8 + 4 rule can be beneficial. You can use 8 characters with 1 upper-case and 1 lower-case, a special character like an asterisk and a number. Make it as random as possible. Also, make sure the numbers and symbols are spread out through the password to foil hackers.

Avoid using personal information like your birth date or last name etc.

Use different passwords for different accounts. This can be helpful if there are numerous computers in the same department.

Adopting passphrases in combination with symbols and numbers can be useful. For example, The Sun Will Rise Again Tomorrow. Also, keep the characters less in the passwords that are easier to remember.

You may consider not changing the passwords frequently and it is safer not to write them down anywhere.

Do not share the password over electronic media.

Add other barriers like two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication.

Set a number that will lock the user out after few unsuccessful attempts.

Conclusion

Password security has evolved over the years in the digital arena. It is significant to have a strong set of rules while deploying password policies. They should not only assist users in avoiding bad passwords but aid in employing high entropy secure passwords. Drupal provides a superb platform to enforce strong password policies with its amazing set of modules.

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